Today I'm reading They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us while the music that author Hanif Abdurraqib discusses in each essay plays in the background. I highly recommend reading the book this way.
"Sadness at that age has the pleasing texture of imprisonment: you reared and sulked against the bonds of parents and school and age, the things that kept you from the certain happiness that awaited." ?
"All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you--the boys had spent that time becoming themselves."
"'The dead move on,' he had said, coiled in his armchair, hands between his thighs. 'But the living, we just stay here.'"
"Sometimes the things we believe we hear are really just our own shifting needs..." ?
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
